On December 11, 1957, American cartoonist and Reason magazine contributor Peter Bagge was born.
America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.
But they know what they hate.
After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.
When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.
The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”
As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).
Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.
That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Passy, Dunant and Huck
On December 10, 1884, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published. This novel, narrated in the first person by the title character, is a dark comedy of the antebellum South and slavery, and has been considered by many American critics and writers to qualify as the “Great American Novel.”
On this date in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded — to economist Frédéric Passy (pictured above), co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; and to Henry Dunant the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Passy was an admirer of Cobden, and an active member in the French Liberal School of Political Economy that developed in the tradition of J.B. Say, Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, and Frédéric Bastiat. His published works include Leçons d’économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l’Instruction (1864); L’Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); and La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875).
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Arthur Latham Perry
“Wantonly and enormously heavy lies the hand of the national Government upon the masses of the people at present. But the People are sovereign, and not their transient agents in the government; and the signs are now cheering indeed, that they have not forgotten their native word of command, nor that government is instituted for the sole benefit of the governed and governing people, nor that the greatest good of the greatest number is the true aim and guide of Legislation.”
Arthur Latham Perry, 1890, preface to Principles of Political Economy, 1891.
Folks in government are prone to overstepping their bounds.
Take, for example, the North Vancouver, British Columbia, City Council, which has instituted a mandatory sticker program for gas pumps. Starting in 2016, public service announcements will appear on North Vancouver gas pump nozzle handles.
What for?
To warn us of the danger of global warming.
Though the city government hasn’t accepted any particular message, Autoblog reports that the policy is clear: “The idea behind the warnings isn’t to shame people for filling up an internal combustion engine but instead to suggest that there could be more eco-friendly alternatives.”
Autoblog calls this new move a “small step to help fight the planet’s rising temperatures,” and that North Vancouver “will likely be the first city in the world” to enact such a mandate.
I am sure city pols are proud of themselves.
The ordinance was pushed by a not-for-profit Canadian group called Our Horizon. The goal? Make a “positive impact on the environment” with this “relatively low cost but highly visible strategy.”
The official estimate on costs? Between C$3,000 and C$5,000. Costs to businesses? “Gas station owners must display [the stickers] as a condition of their business license.”
Meanwhile, the unsettled science of climate change teeters ahead, as The Rebel Media reports: increased carbon dioxide may not cause extra warming (chlorofluorocarbons do that), but does induce greening, helping plant life to flourish.
When the truth finally emerges, out of the fog blown over the issues by groupthink, the findings of legitimate science probably won’t fit on a sticker.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mutual Aid, the Areopagitica, &tc.
On December 9, 1958, the John Birch Society was founded in the United States. December 9 also marks the birthdays of
- Poet and anti-censorship advocate John Milton (1608), author of the masterpiece of blank verse narrative, Paradise Lost (1667) and the defense of free speech and the press, Areopagitica (1644).
- Russian prince and anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin (1842), author of Mutual Aid and other books and pamphlets.
- John Malkovich (1953), who directed The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and starred in the odd eponymous film Being John Malkovich (1999) . . . and many other movies
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C. S. Lewis
The only people who object to escapism are jailers.
C. S. Lewis, as quoted by Arthur C. Clarke, God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988).
Reacting to terrorism, President Obama’s first thought? Scratch out the Second Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” from the Bill of Rights. Why? To advance his mania for gun control.
Now comes Republican front-runner Donald Trump, one-upping the president. He wants to block any Muslim from entering the U.S. — whether immigrant, refugee or even tourist.
That’s after advocating a government database for tracking American citizens who are Muslim.
Terrorism is winning.
Ignore the Constitution? Disregard individual rights? Demonize an entire religion? Thus our leaders play into ISIS’s hands, encouraging Muslims worldwide to see the U. S. as their enemy.
Cooler heads must prevail. Or else. A Republican friend posted on Facebook that he “would gleefully vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump.” I just cannot muster any glee.
In fact, I’m beginning (again) to wonder if John Fund wasn’t on to something last June, when he wrote in National Review that “just maybe Trump is a double agent for the Left.”
Think “Manchurian Candidate.”
“It’s all very un-American,” my friend Suhail Khan, an American Muslim and conservative activist, told the Washington Post. “Our country was based on religious freedom.”
No more?
Surely, our experiment in limited government has not ended.
But we need to get serious.
We must demand a real commitment from any candidate seeking the country’s highest office. To be entrusted to execute our union’s laws, he or she must actually demonstrate allegiance to the rule of law.
That is, a willingness to fit one’s ego within the confines of the Constitution.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The Brookings
On December 8, 1927, one of the United States’ oldest think tanks was founded through the merger of three organizations that had been created by philanthropist Robert S. Brookings. Called the Brookings Institution, it would provide a blueprint for future work by research and advocacy organizations in the modern era.
On this date in 1974, a plebiscite abolished the monarchy in Greece.
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The Marquis de Lafayette
“I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.”
Lafayette, Letter to his father-in-law, the Duc d’Ayan (December 4, 1776).